definitely helping him understand plays that he has with the swap for the seat and what that can get them. >> so do you think that blagojevich knew what he was doing was wrong, or do you still think he feels he's innocent? >> i still feel he probably feels he's innocent. well, or at least that he didn't do anything else that nobody else has done in their life. that would be, you know, going back to whichever those privacy question about sort of that mindset in his head. that's my feeling. >> to me, i think the key piece of evidence is the one thing that i mentioned earlier, and covering a lot of trials over the years there's usually one thing somewhere along the line that's a real tell in terms of what was going on. i know this is what the feds triggered on too. he tried to argue that when he was talking with people on the phone about sending jesse jackson jr. to the senate, that he was trying to scare the

washington establishment into helping him pull off this deal with the madigans back here in illinois. .. for the tech and you send your brother to a meeting in a coffee shop with him and tell him to act like the whole world is listening. keep this under wraps because for whatever his reasons are.

rahm emanuel is not on the phone for is that. he is sending his brother to a guy he thinks is going to give him money for the pick. >> what is he doing there? okay. thanks, everybody. thanks for having us. we are around to sign books for answer more questions if you want. >> thanks to booktv too. [applause] >> booktv is on facebook. like us to interact with a booktv guests and viewers and get up-to-date information on events. facebook.com/booktv. >> michael grunwald prevents his thoughts on the hundred dollars stimulus bill, the american recovery and reinvestment act, financial law by president obama

and submit -- february 17th, 2009. this is about 50 minutes. [applause] >> thanks, all of you for braving the rain. i am thrilled to start by tour in new york. my wonderful parents are here. the only new yorkers who go to florida to visit their grandchildren. there are a lot of facts and figures and fun characters and colorful stories in this book. i knew it was going to be controversial. it is a revisionist history of the obama stimulus and just about everybody hates the obama stimulus. sometimes it feels like obama hates it too. he won't say the word stimulus any more. kind of hard to blame him. a year after it passed the percentage of americans who believe the stimulus created

jobs was lower than the percentage of americans who believed elvis was a live. at one point i tell a story how obama told his cabinet that the stimulus was the only thing less popular than he was. in any case when you put the words change and obama this close together you are going to get yelled at. "the new new deal," right wingers won't except the old new deal and left wingers don't think this spineless sellout of the president is fit to share a book jacket with the new deal. i had a feeling some readers would not get past the first four words and i was right. a few weeks ago i got a google alert that "the new new deal" was in the new republic. i was really psyched because i have written a lot for that magazine and have a lot of friends there. i click on the link. there's a blog post by a 23-year-old researcher who announces right away he couldn't even make it to the first page.

he couldn't get past the first four words, but not these four first words. from the forward he wrote it was so disturbing, so washington that i had to put the book down. addressed to a woman i can only assume is grunwald's wife it reads as follows. to christina, my stimulus. he was trashing my dedication page. i don't think the terrorists who are trying to kill salman rushdie ever trashed his dedication page. so washington, says this kid who lives in washington. a woman like only assume is his wife. i can only assume you are single. if christina really is his stimulus does that mean she prevented him from collapsing into an unprecedented

depression? if we accept the merriam-webster definition of stimulus as something that rouses or incites to activity, is noted comes across as a strangely explicit display of rivalry. come visit us in south beach and we will show you that. my stimulus is here tonight. where did she go? there she is. christina did prevent me from collapsing into a depression. anyone who has written a book can empathize with that. she definitely rouses to activity. change that diaper. and obama's stimulus did too. $800 billion american recovery and reinvestment act, he signed a month after he took office. it may become a national joke but it did prevent american from collapsing into a depression and

it has rows all kinds of activity. it wants over 100,000 projects to upgrade roads and bridges and subways and military bases, fish hatcheries. i could go on all day. it transforming america's approach to energy, education, health care, transportation and more. it is one of the most important and least understood pieces of legislation in modern american history. the short-term recovery part as well as the long term reinvestment hard. is also the purest distillation of what obama meant by change. it is a major down payment on his campaign promises. the story of the stimulus, not only a fun and gripping story but a microcosm of the obama era. the best way to understand the president, his policies, his approach to politics, his achievements and his troubled

marketing. also the best way to understand his enemies. this book documents the republican plot to destroy obama before he even took office. you always heard about it and imagine it must be there. i got these guys to tell me about it in the secret meetings where eric cantor and mitch mcconnell planned last act of power so before i open it up to what you want to talk about i will talk a little about the stimulus because it really is a new new deal and a bit about obama because there's more and less to him than meets the eye. i spent nine years as a reporter at the washington post before i escaped the beltway with my florida girls. government is not a new topic for me. i do not think i could have written this book if i still lived in washington. the group think is too strong. it is almost impossible to overstate the power of the d.c. conventional wisdom that the stimulus was a ludicrous failure and it is totally uncool to talk

about it without rolling your eyes and making a little ironic comment, you totally stimulated the economy when you gave that panhandler a dollar. even obama joked that his annual thanksgiving party that he saved or created four turkeys. my friends here, they know i have a contrarian streak. i don't do group saying. i am the guy who visited the gulf after the bp spill and moved the environmental damage is wildly overstated and i was right. i have data. arguing that the stimulus was "the new new deal" was not just contrarian. it was considered delusional. arguing that the bp spill didn't happen. we will discuss why. combination of republican distortion, incompetent white house communication, brain did media coverage, the unfortunate

timing of the jobs bill that passed when the u.s. was hemorrhaging 800,000 jobs of month. the financial earthquake had hit, the economic tsunami had not hit the shore. in 2010 i was 1,000 miles away and oblivious to the prevailing stimulus narrative but i did become aware because i write a lot about the environment that the stimulus included $90 billion for clean energy which was leveraging another $100 in private capital. the united states was spending $3 billion a year on clean energy before the recovery act. in 1999 washington completely knocked president clinton's pie in the sky plan to send $6 billion over five years on clean energy. it was that on arrival in congress and obama got $90 billion in his first month before his staff could even find a bathroom in the west wing.

just ridiculous. the stimulus was pouring rivers of cash into wind, solar and other renewable energy efficiencies and every imaginable form and advance biofuels, a electric vehicles, cutting edge research, a smarter grid, cleaner coal, factories that make that green stuff in the united states and it was by far the biggest energy bill in history. it got me curious what else was in the stimulus everyone was laughing about. i did some dogged investigative reporting and the stimulus also launched race to the top which was a real of moment. that you heard of race to the top? i heard about it and i knew it was a huge deal in the education reform world that was supposed to transform public schools. i had no idea it was the stimulus program. did any of you? it became clear that there was a

huge story hidden in plain view. most of the stimulus was just standard keynesian stimulus, pumping money into the economy when the private economy had gone into hiding, trying to generate demand through tax cuts for 90% of the work force, gigantic checks to prevent massive layoffs of teachers and cops, aid to victims of the great recession, basic infrastructure projects. then you look and it has $27 billion to computerized our pen and paper health care system so a doctor doesn't kill you with his chicken scratch and writing. authorized a new high-speed rail network, the biggest transportation initiative, extending our existing high speed internet to underserved communities with a modern twist on the new deal's rural electrification program, included america's biggest push into the electrical policy since fdr and the biggest infusion of research money ever, and eyes

unemployment insurance, have >> reporter: since the new deal and launch new approaches to preventing homelessness, financing public-works, overseeing government spending, and the top economic forecasters do all agree it helped stop that terrifying free fall. gdp was crashing 8.9% in the fourth quarter of 2008. there's a depression. at that rate we would have lost an entire economy in 2009. it is funny, the job losses peaked in january of 2009 right before the stimulus past. that's bring the jobs numbers were really grim but they had the biggest quarterly improvement in 30 years. i told this to my editors at time magazine. i hope none of them are here. totally lying. they were like what?

the stimulus? that was old news. unemployment was 9%. what else is there to say? things could be worse? things could be worse. actually it flew up to new york to make my case in person and you could see their eyes glazing over. i told them i felt like a reporter in 1938 trying to convince them they ought to do a story on the presidential initiative called the new deal. they looked at me like i was that blogger in the newsroom picking up a story of out bigfoot. to their credit they let me write an article about how the stimulus was changing america which led to this book and they did let me keep writing articles about this world stimulus that was on time, under budget, virtually fraud free, pretty impressive unmanaged, full of good government reform and totally unlike the stimulus everyone else was making fun of. it really is a big deal. it really is a new new deal.

i will read from the passage where i explain why. cannot sell it liberals claim the recovery act pales in comparison to the new deal. it did not create new government workers and alphabet agencies like the wta and the ccc. didn't establish new entitlements like social security and deposit insurance. new federal responsibility like security regulation and labor relations. it didn't set up workfare programs for the creative class like the federal theater project, a federal music project for federal art project. obama aides grumble it could have used the new federal writers' project to turn out better pro stimulus propaganda. it did not raise taxes. it reduced taxes for the vast majority of american workers although very few of them noticed. obama and his aides thought a lot about the new deal while assembling the recovery act but in some ways it is apples to bicycle comparison. fdr forced the new deal through

a broad of sometimes contradictory initiatives acted and adjusted over several years the stimulus was one piece of legislation called together and squeezed through congress before most of obama's appointees were nominated. in new deal was a journey, the recovery act was just a bill on capitol hill. but it was an astonishingly big bill. in constant dollars was 50% bigger than the entire new deal. twice as big as the louisiana purchase and the margin plan combined. multibillion-dollar line items were erased and inserted with casual keystrokes, obama aides to serve then-president clinton occasionally paused to recall their feudal push for a $19 billion stimulus that seemed impossibly huge in 1993 with vicious internal battles over a few million bucks for beloved programs that seem too trivial to discuss. after a live microphone cause

vice president biden calling the health-care the big frigging deal, suggested -- we are on c-span, i suggested to the chief of staff the stimulus was just as big, bigger. we probably did more in that one bill than the clinton administration did in eight years, one adviser told me. critics often argue that while the new deal left behind iconic monuments like the hoover dam, skyline drive, fort knox, the stimulus will leave a legacy of sewage plants, repaved potholes and state employees who would be laid off without it. even recovery act architects feared like winston churchill putting it to seem, in reality creating its own icon, the world's largest farm, half-dozen of the largest solar farms, zero energy border stations, stated the are battery factories, eco friendly coast guard headquarters on a washington

hillside. it is also restoring called icons like the brooklyn bridge and the dave bridge, the the the everglades and dammed up the river, seattle's tight place market and the staten island ferry terminal. its main legacy like the new deal will be change. that is its main theme. is not in new deal. obama is not a classic new deal liberal. he shares some of fdr's traits, self assurance bordering on egomaniac, harvard pedigree and even keel and allergy to ideologues he is not the second coming of fdr. he didn't grow up rich and didn't battle polio, he doesn't welcome the hatred of the elite and has a unique bond with the masses. doesn't share roosevelt's mistress of experts and take his campaign promises much more seriously than fdr ever did but the recovery act did update the new deal for a new year of. was obama's one shot to pursue

his vision. a down payment on his agenda of curbing fossil fuel dependence and carbon emissions, modernizing healthcare and education, making the tax code more progressive and government more effective and building a sustainable competitive twenty-first century economy. let me talk about obama because this book is about his vision. i did like to reveal some new psychological pherae of the man. his dad was an economist. really, thank david maraniss for that stuff. pages are basically the same, no drama, surrey girl, low blood pressure, comfortable in his skin, somewhat aloof. almost comically reasonable alpha male you will find in a non in sane biography. he is droll and chill. there are funny stories about him. in october of 2008 after lehman

brothers collapsed and the john mccain campaign was imploding with the economy obama said one of his advisers is too late to hand this pile of scrap to john mccain and a party that created it? the adviser said probably too late. obama goes at least we are buying low. not low enough it turned out. in december when his economic aid christina romer called with the first jobs report she said i am so sorry, the numbers are horrible. he goes it is not your fault -- yet. at one point david axelrod was in the white house, he said aloud he wondered what it would be like to govern in good times. the president laughed. i you kidding? good times we never would have gotten the job. my book does what other books don't. look at obama through the lens

of his belief and policies. a lot of fly on a wall conversations in the white house in the back rooms of capitol hill but this book gets beside battery factory that high-speed rail meetings and a facility of that infamous solar manufacturers, solyndra. my novel approach to evaluating this president was to figure out what he is doing and this is the most important thing you should know about barack obama. he has mostly tried to do what he said he would do. he came into office with a well-defined theory and try to put it into practice. sounds boring. the book is more interesting than that. no drama. his campaign agenda didn't attract much attention partly because everyone was obsessed with his race and pastor and ads comparing him to paris hilton and partly because his agenda was mostly the standard democratic agenda of reversing the bush era and investing in the future.

he cares about policy but is not a policy entrepreneur and his campaign was not about new ideas. was about a relentless message of change and the aspiration weekend believe i addendum, the sense that he would follow through on old ideas that never seemed to go anywhere and he has. except for those ideas about changing washington and moving beyond partisan conflict. those didn't really pan out. there is an awful lot of partisan conflict in this book. on the upper west side i should probably be telling war stories about obama versus the republicans. but because i am a contrarian i thought i would read a little bit of my take on obama vs hillary because it helps explain the next four years. the case for obama was not substantive case for changing policies. hillary was making a similar case with a better resume. the case for obama was a political case for why those

policies never seemed to change. implied hillary was part of the problem. america couldn't afford another decade of clinton wars. the political pettiness and nastiness that exploded during the clinton era was the fundamental obstacle to fundamental change. hillary's one word explanation for the status quo's persistence was republicans. obama's one word explanation was washington. the endless spin cycles, insult industries and pull driven platitudes that made tough choices and common sense compromise impossible. as a symbol and a participant hillary was inextricably linked to the washington gridlock machine, the bickering and parsing, he turtle mitigation of the 60s. she could never make a critical we are one people speech or bring people together to solve big problems. she tried and failed in 1994 with her husband's health-care plan. the case for hillary was she knew how to fight republicans.

she was comfortable in the muck. the case for obama was he could move politics beyond the mock. obama's ideas about changing politics were always a means to the end of changing those policies. in springfield when he announced his campaign for president he listed the four main problems he was running to solve. the tendons on oil that threatens our future, a health-care crisis, schools where too many children aren't learning and families struggling paycheck to paycheck this by working as hard as they can. the real solutions would be impossible until washington moves beyond the noise and the rage. what stopped us from meeting these challengess is not the absence of sound policies and sensible plans. what stopped us, failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics, the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, chronic avoidance of tough decisions, preference for cheap political points instead

of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle big problems. that was the essence of obama's case against hillary clinton and it was wrong. it turned out it was possible to make progress on long-term problems even when washington remained distracted by the petty and the trivial. the proof would be in the recovery act. it would produce dramatic change in energy, health care, education and squeeze on struggling families before the new foundation for growth, without working consensus or any pause in the scoring of political points. this is a book about change. the first word of the book. it purveyed the sounds change requires 60 votes in the united states senate. obama took office during an economic cataclysm and decided in an emergency, changing the country was more important than changing the capital. the central drama of this book is literally the central

section, how obama pushed this change into law in his first month. wasn't clean and it wasn't pretty. rahm emanuel was in the middle of it so it wasn't suitable for younger years either. the whole stimulus debate was a case study in obama to the disillusionment addicts of the left, it proved obama was just like every other politician, more interested in cutting deals than chasing dreams, desperate to compromise with republicans who were only interested in surrender, to the fever swamps on the right it revealed obama as the euro socialist radical who somehow is a chicago style partisan and a wimpy wimpy who is deferring to his leftist congressional overlords all at the same time. in reality the stimulus was early evidence that obama was pretty much what he said he was, a data oriented left of center technocrat who is above all

pragmatist comfortable with compromise, unwilling to sacrifice the good in pursuit of the ideal. the first evidence that after campaigning as a change the system outside he would govern as a work the system inside. despite his floury talk he understood bills that don't pass congress don't produce change. the stimulus is producing change. not producing perfection. is making things better. better is better than worse. before the stimulus, 20% of doctors use electronic medical records. by 2015 just about all americans will have one. the stimulus directly lifted seven million americans out of poverty. the homelessness prevention program kept 1.2 million people off the streets. the homelessness population declined during the great recession. an obscure problem called build america bonds financed $180 billion worth of local infrastructure projects. it was like a stimulus tucked inside a stimulus and no one

noticed it. i spent a lot of time explaining how the stimulus launch the clean energy revolution, redoubling renewable power, and governing the domestic industry for electric vehicles from scratch, jump starting the smart grid, etc.. we have reduced our dependence on foreign oil to the lowest level since 95 and carbon emissions are dropping even though the economy is growing. all you hear about is the solyndra scandal which isn't even a scandal. it is supposed to stimulate -- symbolize solar power is a mirage. mitt romney called it imaginary but thanks to the stimulus solar installations increased 600% since 2008. obviously the recount -- the economy is struggling and it is fair to point out obama and his recovery act have not lived up to the initial-but nothing in life except parents live up to the height. did i mention mitt romney? i think i did. he put the stimulus at the center of his presidential campaign which is totally

appropriate. there ought to be a great debate about government intervention in various sectors of the economy and how government should respond to a downturn. most of the items in the recovery act enjoy bipartisan support until january 20, 2009. every 2008 presidential campaign candidate proposed a stimulus package, the largest was mitt romney's but it is legitimate to debate the lessons going forward. there ought to be a debate about the actual stimulus, not some imaginary stimulus that outsourced wind turbines to china. the stimulus almost double but domestic content of u.s. wind turbines and doubled the u.s. when production. we are hearing about this crazy stimulus that shuffled money to the president's cronies. there hasn't been a single example of a corrupt deal. in this book i actually exposed the first real case of inappropriate political pressure, valerie jarrett with the situation room to try to get him to approve a loan when the

guy resisted the white house backed off. that was the same guy who made the call on solyndra and there was no pressure on that. we are moving into another election about change. the central question is whether government is capable of contributing to positive change. the stimulus has become exhibit a for the republican argument that it can't which is weird because it should be exhibit a for the argument that it can. i realize i probably sound like an obama cheerleader. it is an extremely uncomfortable role for me. a funny scene for the end of the book i'm talking to vice president joe biden who oversaw the stimulus. he let me sit in on a cabinet meeting devoted to the stimulus and is giving me a hard time. i read all your articles, you are the only guy who wrote anything positive. i'm usually more of a downer than little mary sunshine and my friends will back me up on that.

it is unusual for me. he starts laughing at me, took him to bed and slept on them, didn't get into journalism to tell stories that joe biden would want to cuddle with. i followed the facts. my stories only look glowing compared to the ridiculous gotchas that have passed for journalism. like i said about bp. i have seen the data. it is all in this boar stock. i hope you will read it for yourself rather than drone on and on. i will take your questions about the stimulus and the republican than the president or whatever you want. i think -- >> thank you for writing this book. i am one of those old-style liberals. i share with you an appreciation

of all that was done by the recovery act but i have two sources of frustration. the first one is obama should have been a better horse trader and asked for a lot more because the law of common sense says the more you ask for the more you the law of common sense says the more you ask for the more you will get. my second frustration is where are the sound bites from the campaign? he is not telling the story michael grunwald is telling. he needs to be taught how to speed base. he needs to be taught how to give a good interview pitch. we are not getting that from the campaign. he is letting the republicans tell the story and he is very weakly responding. >> thank you. i talked to somebody pretty high up who said the same thing i am embarrassed to say. he said i wish we told that

story. your first question, your first point that he should have got more, my answer to all these questions is going to be read the book, but read the book. he could not have gone one dime more out of congress. some people are aware there were a three republican votes, arlen specter whose vote drove him into the democratic party, the twin princesses from maine as one congressman called them and they were not willing to do one dime more than $800 million. but as the report, there were half a dozen democratite dsenats who had drawn a line in the sand and this is the theme of the obama presidency. when you need 60 votes you suddenly have president mark begich of alaska, nothing will

be acceptable to him. it is a high wire act. if you don't think there was enough horse trading you need to read chapters where rahm emanuel is going to work on this thing. bottom line is they said we wanted 80-20, 80% of what the president wants and congress can get 20%. they probably got 85% or 90% and they did end of following up with another $700 billion worth of stimulus over the next ve ho years. obama didn't make a speech saying i want another stimulus because then q hit everybody hitting stimulus and it wasn't easy because he was facing a very hostile republican party even on things like unemployment eenefits and small business ta cuts that have always been central to bipartisan philosophy but it is hard to see how he could have gotten a lot more. we can't run a double blind study of a different political

economy where he communicated better and i talk about the communication mistakes he mswe but i urge preadple -- this bla guy whose middle name is hussain is not a total political icf1 o iot and he did not suddenly become one 9 january 20th, 2009. it is tough to sell your program when you have unemployment. ä0 bou can wait for the -- crew change my intuition is to spend

money requires time and thought and study and i am hearing you say a lot of money was spent. was it spent well? did we get the best bang for the buck? >> read the book. this is -- the question was decently it is difficult to spend $800 billion and there were a lot of different programs, did we get good bang for the buck. this is put together and implemented by imperfect people, passed through an extremely imperfect legislative process. it is not perfect. the gap between the reputation and what it has done is startling. before the stimulus when you

talk to independent fraud experts, they were warning 5% to 7% of the stimulus could be lost to fraud. some of it is not complicated. you said it is hard to spend money. it is easy to spend. there are $300 billion worth of tax cuts. it is easy to get tax cuts. you are just sending people their money back. there are $200 billion of aid to states, giving to state so they don't have to cut costs or reduce medicaid services. we know how to give out $250 checks to seniors like that stimulus did or food stamps or unemployment benefits but the stuff that was spent people expect a lot of fraud and 5% to 7%, so far, they put basically the toughest investigators in washington who's sort of broke open the jack abramoff scandal

and, the oil regulators who were sleeping with oil executives, to oversee the stimulus and they found $7.2 million worth of fraud which is 2.0%. i quote the saying, i was flabbergasted. is ridiculous. republicans, democrats, communists, everybody ought to be celebrating this. i can tell -- i don't want people to run for the exit but i tell some implementations stories that are more fun than they sound about the weatherization division which was known as the turkey farm at the department of energy because that is where. basically sent his staff because it is impossible to get rid of republican police so he thought of he killed the weatherization program he would put the worst employees there and kill it. i tell the story about the woman who came in and shook up the turkey farm. it has at the ending where the

weatherization program which got off to a horrible start and everyone rode terrible stories about it, got into shape and weatherize a million homes and no one has written any stories about it but also the turkeys. what they said behind a political appointees's that, we be here and you've begun and they were right. a ridiculous saying where she hired somebody without playing by the rules and had to resign so it is hard to make change. there really is a lot of good government reform in the stimulus. the biggest one is they do a lot through competitive programs so instead of the entitlement mentality where every transportation project, if you have done minority hiring and small-business hiring and traffic studies you get a check, check the box and here you go, you had to show your project

actually had economic and environmental value, not just shovel ready but shovel word the. that is a radical concept in the federal government. yes, in the front row, wait for the microphone. >> two things. why did the president give priority to health care rather than double down on jobs, which was the more critical situation in this country at the time and still is, i think, and somewhat related to that why didn't his people go over the head of congress and appeal directly to their constituents including

mcconnell's constituents and john boehner's constituents in their own district? >> the first question i blanked on it, why focus on health care instead of jobs? there's this -- oprah asked him that question. why did you start out with health care instead of jobs? the first thing we did was the recovery act. rahm emanuel would joke one of the dumbest thing they did was succeed too quickly. they pass the recovery act in three weeks. if it had taken six months it would have looked like he was focusing on jobs but instead he got this thing done and then it was on to the auto bailout which was about jobs but he got that done fast and health care was next in line. certainly health care was politically difficult.

it is not clear if he had been talking about jobs it would have been a lot better. the fundamental problem was he just passed the jobs bill and jobs were disappearing. if he had been out there saying we need more stimulus people would have said you just passed stimulus and it didn't work which they said anyway. he got more stimulus by not talking about it and working quietly through congress. the question is why didn't he -- i asked david axelrod a question similar to your second part which is one question a lot of us have about obama is his campaign in 2008 broke all the rules, giving speeches in a stadium, blowing off democratic interest groups who invite him to debate. john kerri wanted to endorse him and he said no. he is on the internet and social me and all this crazy stuff no one ever heard of.

i said to axelrod i didn't have a better idea how he could have done this but why didn't you break the rules in washington and axelrod's answer was the essentially because it is washington. it is not america. there really are sort of prisoner to the tyranny of 60 votes. obama really does believe or did believe that if we get the policy right the politics will take care of themselves. he said that was blowing down from the top. they took the perverse pride in we will put our heads down and do the right thing. for democrats your heads will explode when you read this, saying tax cuts, you may remember in 2008 george bush did a stimulus that was $180 billion and they send everybody a check, love george bush. here is the money.

obama did the same thing except for the czech part because behavioral economics shows when you get that check you are marginally more likely to put it in the bank instead of spending it and the whole deck of stimulus is to spend it so the economists said the best thing to do with the decrease with holdings so everybody will get a couple extra dollars in their paycheck every week. they won't notice and that way they will be more likely to spend it. exit the won't notice it. we are denying ourselves hour epic moment, the squeal of delight when you get your publishers clearing house check in the mail. i talked to one of the policy guys after words to explain this made very good sense but in retrospect it was totally stupid. rahm emanuel said the opposite thing. the economist said put the money

in people's frigging paychecks so they fretting spend it or whatever, but we did the right thing because the policy was right and you could tell 100% of them believed they did not do the right thing. i don't think they forgot how to do politics but as you can tell from the last few months there is an at those that policy and politics are not the same thing. obama will say things like that sometimes. there will be a time to do politics and i am pretty good at politics, others would say it is always the time to do politics and that is what you are getting. two more. in the back. >> talk a little bit about what you see as the role of the way the mainstream media covered

this stimulus as to how high had been received by the american public. the polarization that people are going to believe what they want to believe and political reporting in general without news coverage works nowadays. >> i don't care the we are on c-span. the media sox. they were horrible. i have a lot of fun -- i had a big file that said gotcha that started to get really fat and this investigative reporter at usa today, very good investigative reporter but they put him on the stimulus. i went through everything he wrote because he wrote the stimulus is spending too much money in rural areas. the stimulus is spending too much money in urban areas. my favorite story was one that first he said was spending too much money too slobodan numbers started to sell -- his case study was michigan.

michigan is not getting enough stimulus money and right after -- he didn't mention in that story that five of the six new battery factories were in michigan. after saying they were not spending money fast enough, he did one that said -- trying to remember the headline, something like traffic set to slow as stimulus gears up. finding the cloud in every silver lining. all this roadwork, people are going to be very upset about that. it did have an effect. the big stimulus story that got big play was you might even remember it. the phantom congressional districts. remember? $80 billion going to phantom congressional districts. it was typos, like they had the zip code or congressional district. the money did not go to the wrong congressional districts. was filed wrong on recovery.gov

but it made the national news and $90 billion in clean energy. i don't know how much impact it had but couldn't have been enough. in the front row. >> you can't give that answer. there was a promise. when obama came out, one of the things he said was if we pass the stimulus package we will create two billion new jobs and it created a narrative that this would create employment and somehow create a return to have the employment picture. if that hadn't been part of the promise it would not have been part of the expectation people were disappointed by. don't overpromise and underdeliver, underpromise and overdeliver. >> was in january of 2009 that

they put out the report of the 8% report which was stupid. there's a lot about it in the book and a half sinking feeling as they were writing it and they put in the caveat is that unemployment could go to 11% or 12% but no one reads the footnotes. what i would say in their defense is they needed to put a jobs number on this to get through congress, members of congress spent $700 billion on a bank bailout and we are sending $800 billion that could go to their constituents without saying it will create three million jobs and the punch line is it did. there was that eight million of hole and it did as they predicted in that stupid report did increased gdp 2% to 3%. of the economic forecasters agree there were a dozen

independent stores that look at the actual stimulus. they were very positive but the situation was worse then they fought. gdp had fallen 9%, but the numbers were 4%. four% is terrible but 9% is at a calamity. and sold as a jobs bill, joe biden felt they shouldn't just be numbering jobs. they should be talking about the new new deal aspects of it and sympathetic to that view as well. these were understandable mistakes but they were mistakes. >> on television -- prime enterprise, the government far

about i can't give everybody a job, private enterprise has to give people jobs. do you agree or disagree? >> i agree. there was a lot of debate in the administration that this didn't create government jobs. it saves in government jobs at the state level but in the obama era, lost public sector jobs. government has gotten smaller, the private sector might not have done fine as obama said the other day but is doing better than the public sector. there are some funny moments in this book. in the fall of 2009, the bernstein report was so stupid but chris c. roberts and jared bernstein rethinking about how to do a wpa type of thing. the one thing like that in the stimulus where they await the subsidy program were state sen

nonprofits could hire people and the fed's -- was welfare to work program which was ironic given what we are hearing 90 them haley barbour, republican governor of mississippi, it created 250,000 jobs at 5,000 per job so it was incredibly successful program. kristy roemer started calling government agencies, how many could you hire, we could hire a lot for 20,000. that eroded the administration hiring four million people in the winter of 1934. jared bernstein gave a presentation, a few different ideas and the third idea was a national inventory of structures. the idea was to take people working on the census, 300,000 people who had their clearance

and do the national inventory that would be very helpful for data collection, and joe biden's guy was like just stop there. i might be able to sell something where we are going to build buildings. i am not going to sell something where we count buildings. the national inventory structures went nowhere. the feeling was this isn't the new deal, there's no political appetite to create massive government bureaucracy. it is a lot harder to stand them up these days and fdr had it easy because the government had not been created yet so you could have something like the ccc which heard the million urban use out of their cities and send them to rural work camps. they were known as concentration camps before that term got

uncool and they were paid $1 a day and send the money to their moms. i don't think that would fly today. is hard to know. maybe if he barnstormed the country and said we needed a new ccc maybe it would have worked but i don't think that would have happened in the last few years. i think i need to stop but i will be signing books and i appreciate everyone coming out in the rain. >> visit the author's website michaelgrunwald.com. >> during those years it really was scary before we liberated baker county. to have this happen, to have a logger, you are only trying to do the best you can for everyone

and to have someone take your words, use the equipment that they have today to pet and splice, to make your message appeared to be the exact opposite of what it was and what is, is just an unbelievable situation and it is a way to terrorize someone because you don't know that you will ever really be able to get through that. i was determined even if i had to tell one person at a time. >> it makes me think this whole bdm energy around this book, last time there was this media energy was july of 2010 when it went down, going back to those

places, making those accusations, the speed at which that happened. now you do have low whole story. >> it feels good to know that first of all i was able to use the same media in a sense to get the right story out. feels -- i can't explain how great it feels to be able to sit here, i don't know if you saw me, i was crying, really amazing, i made the decision years ago that i didn't want people to forget my father and what he meant to us. i had no idea i would be able to tell the story in this way. it feels great. >> what is so beautiful about this book, it is more than a

book. it is of living history, like a love letter to choices and it reminds us that without the feeling, the facts don't convey enough of what history has been calm and that is brutal as african-american struggle for a manatee and rights has been, humanity and love and family and choice and possibility and sacrifice. you were raised in the jim crow south in baker county in george and you were trying to -- at gangster driving the truck at 4 years old. >> in baker county, you hear about, you read about some

earlier years but the sheriff of the county wanted to be known as the gator. the gator ruled everything, everyone in the county. you can't imagine looking at earlier days, anyone like him but he was worse than what you have seen in your worst lesson but growing up in that, my great grandparents came to baker county. i don't know if they came as slaves or not that they ended up there as sharecroppers with the intent of buying land and they did. they bought enough land that the area that i grew up is still today called hawkins town. lots of family but it was that way. they live in less serious -- one area, williams and another and we felt we had to help each

other so i was raised on a farm. there were five girls. any farmer wants a son. my mother and father kept having babies and they were all girls. we all had boys nicknames. i was bill. [laughter] >> that is hilarious. >> as safe as we could be in this situation we were in, we felt safe and comfortable there and i feel like my father wanted us to have an education. he knew that education was the key to a better life but he's got all of us would come right back home and try to work from there. >> you can watch this and other programs online's booktv.org. on n